🏦 Bonds

Every prediction market ends at exactly one of two prices: $1.00 or $0.00.

Which means that somewhere on Polymarket, right now, there are outcomes trading at 98¢ because the market thinks they are very likely to land there. Usually most of the news is already in. What stands between that price and a dollar is time, and the 2% chance the market has it wrong — and somebody has to be willing to carry both.

Bonds finds those outcomes for you. All of them. Sorted, priced, and stress-tested.

Open Bonds from the app header.

The Idea In One Line

You pay 98¢ for something that pays $1.00 when it settles. That's the whole product.

The catch — and there is always a catch — is that it pays $1.00 if it wins. If it loses, it pays zero. High probability is not certainty. We'll come back to that, and we'll be blunt about it, because the people who make money here are the ones who took that sentence seriously.

But first, the part nobody tells you.

Why Anyone Buys These

A high probability is not a decided outcome. At 97¢+ the market is saying something is very likely, usually because most of the news is already in. That's a genuinely different thing to hold than a coin flip, and it's why these behave a little like short-dated paper: a small return in exchange for parking USDC for a defined stretch of time. But the price is an estimate, not a verdict. At 97¢ the market itself is telling you that about 3 in 100 of these go the other way, and the ones that do cost you the entire stake. Everything below assumes you've taken that sentence seriously.

A small edge, annualized, is not a small number. 2% over 10 days is roughly 90% a year at simple interest. Even 0.5% over 3 days annualizes to something no savings product will offer you. That's the part people miss when they see "2%" and move on: the number that matters isn't the return, it's the return per unit of time your money was tied up. The catch is symmetrical and you should hold both halves at once: the same math means one loss at 98¢ wipes out roughly 50 winners. This scales with patience and position count, not with size or cleverness.

Somebody has to want out early, and they do. Winners often don't want to wait weeks for a market to formally resolve. They'd rather have their capital back today and put it into the next thing, so they sell at 96¢–98¢ and leave the last few cents on the table. That's where your return comes from, and it's worth being precise about what you're being paid for: not patience, but risk transfer. They hand you the remaining upside and the tail where the market or the oracle lands somewhere else. It isn't a mispricing you have to be smart enough to spot, and it isn't free money either.

And the work is already done. There are thousands of markets. Finding the handful trading above your threshold with real depth and a tight spread and a near-term resolution date is hours of manual work that has to be redone every morning. Bonds is that scan, kept warm, sorted by what each one actually pays you after fees.

Why Costs Decide This Trade

Here's the uncomfortable math of buying near-certainty: your upside is thin. A $100 bond at 98¢ buys you about 102 shares, and 102 shares pay out about $102 when they win. Two cents on the dollar. That's the trade.

Which means costs are not a footnote — costs are the entire game. When your gross return is 2%, the fee isn't a rounding error you can ignore. It's a real slice of the only thing you came for. It is, very often, the difference between a bond being worth doing and being a waste of capital.

That is exactly where these prices sit best on Olympus. Positions this close to certainty fall into the cheapest band on the platform — the rate slides down further the closer the price gets to $1 — and whatever discount you've already earned comes off on top of that. A bond that doesn't clear the bar somewhere else can still clear it here.

You don't have to take that on faith, and you shouldn't. Every row shows your net return after fees, not the headline price. Log in and it's calculated at your own rate, not a generic one — so the number on the row is the number that applies to you. Your current rate is always visible under Fees and in your settings.

This is why Bonds is its own page. The pricing was already there. Bonds is the surface that finds every position that qualifies for it.

Read This Before You Trade

We could sell this page harder if we left this section out. We're not going to.

A 98¢ outcome that loses costs you the whole 98¢. You risked $98 to make $2. That ratio is brutal and it is the honest shape of this trade: you will be right most of the time, and the times you are wrong will erase a lot of the times you were right.

This is the exact trade that feels safest and punishes carelessness hardest — because "97% likely" reads to your brain as "basically done," and your brain is wrong about that roughly 3 times in 100. Three percent doesn't sound like much until it's your position.

There's also a second failure mode that has nothing to do with the event. Even when the real-world outcome is settled beyond argument, Polymarket's oracle still has to say so, and it can be delayed, disputed, or land somewhere you didn't expect on a technicality. Resolution risk is not the same as event risk, and a bond can be right about the world and still cost you.

So Bonds is built to argue with you. Every row carries a risk label, a spread, real fill depth, and a plain-language list of what's wrong with it. High-risk rows are hidden until you deliberately go looking for them. None of that is decoration. It's there because the losing trade on this page always looks fine right up until it doesn't.

Trade this like an insurer, not like a lottery player: many small positions, priced carefully, never one that can hurt you.

How People Actually Make Money Here

Three things separate the traders who compound on this from the ones who donate:

1. Time is your real cost. Two cents in three days is a completely different business than two cents in eight months. Same profit, same risk of being wrong — but one of them ties up your capital for a season while the world gets a chance to change its mind. Sort by Ends. Short windows are where the edge lives.

2. Volume beats size. The way you win at 2% is by doing it repeatedly with money you can afford to lose entirely, not by doing it once with everything you have. One 98¢ bond that resolves against you eats fifty winners. Position sizing is the strategy.

3. Read the resolution rules. Every single time. The most expensive losses on this page aren't surprises — they're markets that resolved exactly as written while the trader was reading the headline instead of the terms. Click Open market and read the actual winning condition before you size up.

And one thing that quietly ruins portfolios: correlation. Six bonds on six different markets that all hinge on the same election, the same ruling, or the same game is not six positions. It's one position, six times over, and it can go to zero all at once. Spread across events, not just across rows.

Step-By-Step: Finding And Trading A Bond

Step 1 — Open Bonds

Go to /app/markets/bonds. The page opens on 97%+ with sensible defaults already applied.

Step 2 — Pick Your Threshold

The 97%+ / 98%+ / 99%+ tabs set how certain you want the market to be. Higher threshold, less chance of it flipping, less profit per dollar. This is the trade-off, and it's yours to make.

Step 3 — Cut The List Down

Use the filters: keyword search, resolution window (6h through 180d), minimum 24h volume, maximum spread, and outcome side.

If you only touch one filter, make it resolution window. Start at 7d or shorter.

Step 4 — Set Your Risk Appetite

Toggle the Risk chips — Low, Medium, Elevated, High. High is off by default and you have to opt in to see it. If you're new here, leave it off.

Step 5 — Scan The Table

Sort by any column. The two that matter most: Net Return (what you actually keep after fees) and Ends (how long your money is locked up earning it).

Step 6 — Open The Row

Click any row for the full picture: a 7-day price chart, payout previews at $100/$1k/custom, what your fill would actually cost at size, every reason the risk score flagged it, and the market's own rules.

Check the price chart. A bond that was at 80¢ yesterday and 98¢ today is a very different animal from one that's sat at 98¢ for a month.

Step 7 — Trade It

Hit the cart icon for a quick buy pre-loaded with the right market and outcome, or Open market for the full trading panel. Bonds isn't a separate exchange — it's the same Polymarket order book you already trade, just filtered down to the part that qualifies for the cheapest fees.

What The Numbers Mean

Net Return is calculated on a simulated $100 fill and already has estimated fees baked in. Log in and it uses your rate rather than a generic one. Fees are estimates — the book can move between looking and trading.

APR annualizes that return so you can compare a 3-day bond against a 3-month one. It's a simple rate, not compounding — a bond settles once. On very short windows we cap the displayed number and show it with a >, because a true annualized figure on a 6-hour position is a fantasy number and we won't print it.

The Risk Label, Plainly

Every row gets scored on what's visibly wrong with it: how far from certain the price is, how wide the spread is, whether there's real depth behind the price, whether anyone's actually been trading it, how soon it settles (too far out is risk; so is right now), whether the price just jumped, and what kind of market it is.

Low (0–14) · Medium (15–34) · Elevated (35–59) · High (60+)

Anything above Low tells you exactly why in the detail view. Read those reasons.

This score describes what the order book looks like today. It is not a prediction and it is not a promise. A Low-risk bond can lose. It just doesn't have anything visibly broken about it.

Freshness

The badge next to the title tells you whether prices are Fresh, Stale, Degraded, or still Warming up, plus when they were last updated. If it isn't fresh, hit Refresh before you commit money.

Prices come from a cached snapshot that refreshes in the background, which is why the page is instant. It also means the number you're looking at is seconds-to-minutes old, not live to the millisecond. On a 98¢ bond that rarely matters. On a bond that's moving, it does — which is why we show you the badge instead of hiding it.